"Change is good. I like change. Maybe I'll grow a mustache."

We're experiencing something of an evolution here at our house.  (Although, perhaps, it's really more along the lines of a revolution.  Read on.  Then you can decide.)

At the beginning of this not-so-little adventure, we decided--for the sake of the temporariness of it all (feel free to laugh heartily here)--to stick with the titles we held previously:  Auntie and Uncle.  After all, that's what we were.  Are.  Whatever.

But now it's been over three years of the Fries living here with us.

They've started to notice things.

Like...the fact that most of their friends live with Mommy and Daddy (or one of the two).

I'd have to say that, since about Thanksgiving-ish last year, the twins decided to do some mental sorting.  Within a few weeks of this percolating in their little brains, I was almost exclusively Mommy to the twins, especially Small Fry.  Hubby became sometimes Daddy, sometimes Uncle.  Large Fry tended to stick with Auntie and Uncle as her primary forms of address.  But then, she remembers more, having been almost three when the girls came to live with us.  She remembers the people who originally held the names Mommy and Daddy.  She remembers living with them.

We chose to leave our names up to the kids.  If they wanted to call us Mommy and Daddy, that was fine.  They preferred Auntie and Uncle?  Also fine.  It was their choice, and not something we forced them to do.

Hubby once asked one of the Fries why she'd called him Daddy.  "Because I love you, and I want to call you that," she answered.

Kinda hard to argue with that logic.

So...we answer to both names.  There are days that I'm only Mommy.  There are days (most of them) when I'm called by both.

Because the Fries do have a relationship with their biological dad, my brother, Hubby hasn't been called Daddy with the same level of frequency that I'm called Mommy.  But for the twins, especially now that they've been thrust into the new normal of Hubby working again, he's Daddy far more often to them than he's not.  And when we're not sure which daddy one of the Fries is referring to, they can clarify it easily: Daddy-Uncle.  Or Daddy-S (my brother).  More often than not, the Daddy they want is Daddy-Uncle.

And I told you that story to tell you this one.

We met up at a park in S-burg tonight with a family from our new church, just to kind of get to know each other better.  There's a playground to entertain the Fries after dinner, giving the adults a chance to watch but still talk without (much) interruption.  Win-win.

And as we're sitting there talking, the Fries are running around the playground, getting dirty, making friends, and having a wonderful time.  Large and Medium are playing together-ish in the sandbox.  Small Fry is clambering all over the playground equipment.  It was probably an hour after they started playing that Large Fry came away from the sandbox and made the acquaintance of a little girl about four, who was pretty much her exact opposite in coloring: fine blond hair, blue eyes, I-burn-easily skin.  Large Fry had her by the hand and was leading her around.

Hubby noticed this and called over to Large Fry, telling her to make sure that the little girl stayed in the area where her mommy knew she was.

Then he turned back to me, where I was talking with TE.  "Wave at them," he instructed.  "Wave."

So I did, even though Hubby kinda blocked them from my view by then.

"Did you hear what she's saying?"

I shook my head.

"She's telling that little girl, 'The lady over there in the pink--that's my mom.'  She was pointing you out as her mommy."

I looked down at my bright pink shirt and back up at Large, still holding the hand of her new little friend and heading for the slides.

My smile must have been as mooshy as my heart felt, because Hubby grinned said, "Yeah, I figured that was worth interrupting your conversation for."

**Props to you if you know which movie I'm quoting in the post title.